2019 Summer Lecture Series: Panel On Creative Forms of Resistance

This lecture series focuses its attention on the genealogical transformation of Palestinian women’s resistance. The series explores the different forms of resistance that Palestinian women have taken and draws attention to the varied ways that Palestinian women have been involved with, led, and shaped resistance.

In our third installation of this series, Zena Agha, Nehad Khader, and Rasha Abdulhadi will speak on a panel about the position and perceptions of gender within creative forms of Palestinian resistance, including through film, art, music, and poetry. They will also discuss their own creative work and its location within resistance discourse.

**A light snack will be served at 6:00 pm. Panel discussion begins at 6:30 pm and is followed by a Q&A with the audience.

Zena Agha is an Iraqi-Palestinian writer and poet born in London, currently based in New York. Zena Agha is the U.S. Policy Fellow for Al-Shabaka; the Palestinian Policy Network. Her areas of expertise include Israeli settlement-building in the occupied Palestinian territory with a special focus on Jerusalem, refugees and spatial practices. She has previously worked at the Economist, the Iraqi Embassy in Paris, and the Palestinian delegation at UNESCO. In addition to analysis in Foreign Affairs, The Independent, and The Nation, Zena’s media credits include the BBC World Service, BBC Arabic and El Pais.

Zena’s poems have been translated and published internationally and she has performed at universities and festivals around the US, UK and France. She founded Warwick University’s largest poetry collective, Shoot from the Lip, and was a 2018-2019 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers Workshop working. Her writing has been featured on NPR, PRI’s The World, WBGH, El País, Skin Deep and Muftah. Zena was awarded the Kennedy Scholarship to study at Harvard University, completing her Master’s in Middle Eastern Studies.

Nehad Khader is a filmmaker, curator, editor and cultural historian trained in media and literature by black and Palestinian creators. She is the Program Director at Philadelphia’s BlackStar Film Festival and was Founding Curator of the DC Palestinian Film & Arts Festival for six years until transitioning into an advisory role. She is the producer of White Fright (dir. David Felix Sutcliffe), now streaming on The Guardian, and in-production on her debut feature film. Nehad is a 2017 Flaherty Film Seminar fellow, a 2017 Leeway Transformation Award winner, a 2018 Tribeca Film Institute fellow, and a 2019 Logan Nonfiction Program fellow.

Rasha Abdulhadi is a queer Palestinian Southerner who grew up between Damascus, Syria and rural Georgia and cut their teeth organizing on the southsides of Chicago and Atlanta. Rasha is a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers, Justice for Muslims healing collective, and Alternate ROOTS and is currently executive director at Split This Rock. Their writing has appeared in literary magazines and the anthologies Halal if You Hear Me, Super Stoked, and the Hugo-nominated Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler. They are the author of Shell Houses, available from The Head & The Hand Press. Rasha works in tatreez, the indigenous Palestinian feminist practice of narrative embroidery and has studied with NEA Heritage Fellow Feryal Abbasi-Ghnaim. They are a cultural organizer, fiber artist, community technologist, once and future farmer and beekeeper, and a geek for science both fiction and fact.

We are working to make this event as accessible as possible. The Jerusalem Fund and Palestine Center facilities are wheelchair accessible. The panel as well as the Q&A will be conducted via microphone and will be live streamed. Transcriptions of the event will be available afterwards.

Contact us at palestineinterns@gmail.com with any questions about accessibility or requests for accommodations.